#i wldnt be willing to cry ab my generational trauma on camera but thats just me

[oshaaofficial]

one thing that i haven't stopped thinking about since i saw s2ep2 is that nandor forgetting his native language hasn't come up again. i think that’s strange bcos at the core of this show is rly . like. home and family. and language can be such a huge part of that, and it’s already in the show. some of the scenes that affected me the most were from the s2 finale when guillermo is back at his mom's apartment. this is the first real glimpse we get of guillermo as he might have been pre-panera bread, and he's at home in the bronx telling his mother 'no mama it's okay yeah the documentary people arent hungry yes im sure yes mama really sure' and it's such a personal moment imo and maybe im just getting emo about it bcos it reminds me of my family but. im still right. guillermo likely learned spanish and english simultaneously but spanish is still probably more his first language bcos it's how he communicates with his family. so much of preserving culture is language. and. hmm. in my experience, there's something very difficult about being the child of an immigrant and knowing that whatever direct ties you have to your culture and heritage might be all that you'll ever get. and those connections are sometimes small and useless, but not to you. bcos what else do you have? when i was in kindergarten i stopped speaking spanish because, well, none of my classmates were doing it. i still feel like grieving about it sometimes. even though im practically fluent again.

and so i think of nandor who's so old that even if he remembered al quolanudarese he would have no one to speak it to. it’s a sick reminder. he's like another relic in his crypt, proof of somewhere that doesn't exist anymore. but he exists. whatever he remembers is probably small and useless. but it’s all he has.

so it fucks me up that nandor’s arc has been about loss and loneliness and this utter fucking sense of purposelessness he has. bcos i think so MUCH of that has to do with heritage and family and memories. i think about how ‘jahan’ essentially means ‘my universe’ in farsi, but how present day nandor mispronounces his name as john. and it’s not because he’s lost any fondness for his old horse. i think if anything the memory of feeling love would persist the memory of a name. ghost nandor was the human version of him, and so his last act as a man was to find his beloved horse. but, you know, everything loses it’s meaning when you live for eternity. but it's. sigh. it does matter. nandor's past matters to him i know it i know it does. but if he acknowledges its significance in his life, he'll have to learn exactly how much he's forgotten. it's like playing a sport when you're young and coming back to it years after quitting, and suddenly realizing that your body isn't trained to do these things anymore. like maybe your endurance used to be the last thing on your mind but now you cant play for 5 minutes before you're out of breath-- and you feel almost ashamed. like this language was just a part of you, it was something you could take for granted, english was just something you had to learn. and so years later you default to somewhere in your brain, to maybe the one thing you thought you had kept for over 700 years, and expect a sentence and- and you only remember good morning.

and so i just wonder if it’ll ever come up again. bcos i cant imagine nandor not being upset about that

#i am not projecting thabk you very much. #wwdits #nandor the relentless #AND theres something to be said about found family and the reestablishment of identity #you know what i will tag this with #mikeys nandor dissertation #i am consistent with my tagging. i do not forget to tag my posts. #something something nandor cries about this to guillermo #dont mind me i am just thinking ab how we know they have a more intimate relationship off camera from s3ep9 and . idk #i wldnt be willing to cry ab my generational trauma on camera but thats just me